Lazy 8 Studios hit the ground running last April with the launch of their clever puzzle title Cogs. Featuring steampunk visuals and increasingly difficult challenges, the puzzle title did quite well on Steam and later would wind up as a finalist in the “Excellence in Design” category at the Independent Games Festival and in contention for the Indie Game Challenge $100,000 prize.

While Monaco ran away with the Independent Games Festival honors, Cogs returned home with the $100,000 prize for edging out its competitors at the Indie Game Challenge. Along with around $80,000 in sales on Steam, one could peg Cogs as a financially successful debut into the indie game world.

Rob Jagnow, Lazy 8′s founder, and I grabbed dinner in San Francisco recently to talk about the game’s success and what’s next for him and his cohorts.

Rob graduated from M.I.T. With a PhD in Computer Science and Photo-realistic Graphics, just before the inception of the GAMBIT Games Lab. Taking his knowledge with him, he spent a year traveling the world before landing in San Francisco with his partner where he first decided to start Lazy 8 Studios.

He conceived the idea of Cogs back in 2003, so between concept to completion, the development time for Cogs was around five years. But it wasn’t until he met artist Brendan Mauro that the stark visual design of the title you know today would come to be.

“[Brendan] is great to work with, he gets the technical side of things,” states Rob. He’d worked with artists in the past who didn’t understand both sides of the coin, and having an artist who was happy to work for next to nothing who did “get it” made the project progress much more smoothly. He’s keen to work with Brendan in any capacity possible going into the future.

Cogs was able to make the jump from its PC home onto the iPhone late last year and ended up as a launch title for the iPad where it now stands as a featured title. I had the opportunity to take Cogs for a spin on Apple’s new tablet, and it’s fascinating to see just how the game’s design works with tracing your fingers over the playing field and rotating the puzzle with a sweep of two fingers. It all feels very natural and even with my limited experience of the iPad game library, I’d say any iPad owner should get a copy.

But these weren’t always the platforms Lazy 8 had aimed for. When they submitted Cogs to Microsoft to gain approval for Xbox Live Arcade, they claimed the game was too casual. So when they changed directions and took it to Big Fish for PC distribution, they claimed it was too hardcore. So after consideration of who the audience was, they took it to Steam where it did quite well.

While Steam took 30% of the gross profits, in a year Cogs has made a gross of $79,000 and a net profit of $55,000. “The interesting thing is that it made $21,000 on a single day, though,” Rob clarified. The title went on sale for $2 last Christmas Day and the general populace snapped it up in droves.

The game has been released for over a year now on PC and Lazy 8 had to make a decision about how to handle the roll out. They could have either released it and never spoken of it again, or taken the route that Rob decided on. This route involved a year of upkeep on the game, making sure review sites were getting keys to the game, keeping the title mentioned in the news, and generally providing great support to the title. But the downside to such a course of action is that they haven’t been able to move on to their next game in thirteen months.

But because of the prize and sale money, Rob was able to compensate his contractors for their hard work on the game, and he himself has been contracted to design puzzles for an undisclosed company. These positive moves in the company’s financial department have allowed Rob to enter development on a new game…and it might not be what you’d expect.

Their goal is to “bring high fidelity content to a casual audience.” So what this all means is that Lazy 8 Studios is turning to Facebook, an arena dominated by the casual gaming powerhouses. “Zynga [operates by] hijacking flaws in the human psyche, [whereas we want to make] good content that is not purely addictive.”

So without giving away the entire concept of what they’re doing in front of a marketplace rife with copycats and stolen ideas, I can give just a tiny, teasing quote. They’re aiming to make a Facebook game with “more sophisticated visuals.” It just started coding last week, and they’re not entirely ready to disclose too much.

Any move away from the current market-dominating titles is a good move in my eyes, so I’m curious to hear what else Lazy 8 reveals as their development furthers.

We’re also giving away ten copies of Cogs alongside this piece. To enter to win, just drop a quick note in the forum thread saying something to the effect of “enter!” We’ll accept entries until 12pm PST on Friday, June 11th.